A Command You Never Needed
Self-love and common suffering
Start with the Trinity.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, eternally distinct in person, eternally united in essence, eternally oriented toward one another. The inner life of God is communion. Other-directed love with no beginning and no interruption. The Father gives glory to the Son. The Son submits to the Father. The Spirit proceeds from both and glorifies both. No person of the Trinity is self-enclosed. The divine life is, at its root, outward.
That matters for understanding what we are.
When God creates human beings in His image, He creates us for the same pattern. Communion. Outward orientation. Love directed toward God first, then toward the neighbor who also bears God’s image. That’s the design. We are built for a life that looks like the life of the Trinity: persons in relationship, oriented beyond themselves.
But something else is also true about the design. We are created as self-relating agents. We are aware of ourselves as selves. We have interests, desires, a sense of our own existence. This is part of what it means to bear the image of a personal God. And this self-awareness is good. It has to be good, because God made it.
The problem is what we do with it.
Jesus reveals the diagnosis when He states the Great Commandment. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. There are three loves in that sentence, but only two commandments. Self-love is the assumed baseline, the unit of measurement for how you’re supposed to treat everyone else. Jesus doesn’t command it. He presupposes it.
Every parent has watched this play out. No one teaches a toddler to grab the biggest piece, to scream mine before she can conjugate a verb, to shove a sibling away from a toy. The self-regarding orientation is factory-installed. What requires instruction, correction, and relentless reinforcement is the orientation toward others. We have to be commanded to love God. We have to be commanded to love our neighbor. Nobody has to be commanded to love themselves.
The design is communion. The default is collapse. We are built for outward focus, and we turn inward. Every one of us, individually, at the moment we become capable of distinguishing a God-honoring focus from a self-honoring one, chooses self. We break our own purpose. And that breakage is on us.
This is what makes the contrast between Adam and Christ so sharp.
Adam’s move is the archetypal inward collapse: “You will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). The serpent’s offer is autonomy. Self-rule. Interpretive and moral independence from the Creator. Adam reaches for it. He turns the self-relating capacity God gave him into a self-enclosing prison. The outward orientation toward God and neighbor collapses into the gravitational pull of self.
Christ’s move is the opposite, and it looks like the inner life of the Trinity rendered in human form. “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). Where Adam grasps, Christ submits. Where Adam asserts autonomy, Christ gives Himself over. Philippians 2 traces the trajectory: He did not count equality with God something to be seized, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Christ exemplifies what we were made for. The outward life. The communion life. Self-giving love that holds nothing back. He is the true Image of God, and He shows us what bearing that image was always supposed to look like.
We all chose Adam’s path instead. Individually. Personally. Without exception. The corruption we inherit is real, but the guilt belongs to each of us, because each of us, given the choice, chose the inward collapse over the outward call.
Now consider what Jesus does in Luke 13.
Some people bring Him a piece of current events: Pilate has slaughtered Galileans while they were offering sacrifices. Blood mixed with blood, worship interrupted by political violence. The question hovering behind the report is the one humanity always asks when suffering falls on someone else: What did they do to deserve it?
Jesus answers: “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:2-3, ESV).
Then, before anyone can process that, He raises a second case Himself. Eighteen people crushed when the tower of Siloam collapsed. No political agenda. No human malice. Architecture failed. Gravity and timing converged, and people died. And He gives the identical answer: “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:4-5, ESV).
Two cases. Same conclusion. But they’re structurally different, and that’s the point.
The Galileans were killed by human evil. A ruler with power made a decision, and people died while they were offering sacrifices. That’s the curse working through human agency. Moral evil, political violence, the strong destroying the weak.
The eighteen at Siloam were killed by what we’d call natural evil. No agent. No malice. A tower fell. Gravity and stone and timing converged. That’s the curse working through the groaning creation itself, a world subject to futility and decay (Romans 8:20-22).
Jesus picks both cases because together they represent the full scope of the cursed condition. Human evil and natural evil are both expressions of a broken world. And the crowd’s instinct, faced with either kind, is the same: use the calamity as evidence that the victims were worse sinners than everyone else. The self-regarding mind needs that distinction. If their suffering indexes to exceptional guilt, then your safety indexes to relative innocence. The moral distance protects you.
Jesus refuses the move. But notice how He refuses it. He doesn’t exonerate the victims. He doesn’t say they were innocent. He says they weren’t worse. He levels the field downward. Every person in that crowd stands in the same moral condition as the people who were slaughtered and the people who were crushed. The difference between you and them is timing, not standing.
That’s the inward collapse operating as an interpretive engine. The self-orientation Jesus presupposes in the Great Commandment, the one that never needs a command, isn’t just shaping your moral choices. It’s shaping your perception. Before you’ve even finished processing the news about Pilate’s violence or Siloam’s collapse, your self-love has already constructed a framework in which you occupy different ground than the victims. Their suffering becomes raw material for your reassurance.
That’s communion broken in real time. The outward orientation that would grieve with the suffering, that would recognize shared creaturely vulnerability, that would see the neighbor’s condition as your own, gets overridden by the self-enclosing reflex.
Jesus stacks the two cases to cut off every version of the distancing move. You can’t reduce the Galileans’ deaths to political misfortune and walk away, because the tower had no political dimension. You can’t reduce Siloam to random accident and walk away, because Pilate’s violence was deliberate. Both human evil and natural catastrophe serve the curse, and every person in the crowd lives under the same curse. No one gets to carve out an exemption.
And then the redirect. You repent.
That redirect only works if the universal condition holds. If some people really do stand on fundamentally different moral ground, then the distancing move is sometimes legitimate. Jesus can make the move He makes only because every person in that crowd, at the point of their own moral capacity, has already made the same choice: inward over outward, self over God, autonomy over communion.
The call to repentance here reaches deeper than a list of sins. Metanoia means a fundamental reorientation. Jesus isn’t telling His audience to stop doing specific bad things. He’s calling them to abandon the entire self-centering project that makes them assume they occupy different territory than the people who were crushed.
And notice what He does not do. He doesn’t explain the suffering. He offers no theodicy. He doesn’t say God caused it, permitted it for a greater good, or intended it as punishment. He simply refuses to let the question function the way His audience wants it to function.
They want the suffering of others to be informative about the moral standing of the sufferers. Jesus says it’s informative about the moral standing of the questioners.
Here’s where the whole thread comes together.
The Trinity is eternal communion. Christ exemplifies that communion in human form. We were created for that same outward-oriented life. We all, individually and without exception, chose the inward collapse instead. And that collapse doesn’t just distort our moral choices. It distorts our perception, our reasoning, our reflexive interpretation of the world around us. When we hear about suffering, the communion-designed response would be empathy, shared vulnerability, grief. The actual response, the one that runs before we even know it’s running, is self-protection.
Jesus, in two sentences in Luke 13, exposes the entire mechanism. And the only remedy He offers isn’t better information about why suffering happens. It’s repentance. A total reorientation away from the self that never needed a commandment, and toward the God and neighbor that always will.
The design was communion. The choice was self. The call is to come back.